I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of friends and loved ones in maintaining mental health over professional help.
Salman Rushdie expresses a personal belief that the support and care of friends and loved ones have been more crucial to his mental well-being than traditional therapy. This perspective highlights the value of personal relationships in managing one's mental health and suggests that emotional connections can play a vital role in survival during challenging times.
In practice
During a speech on mental health awareness, I might quote Rushdie to emphasize the role of personal connections in healing.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship.
The point of feminism is you shouldn't have to be a man to be treated with equal respect.
At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
I worked with John, but I had enough sense to walk just a little ways behind him. I could have made more records, but I wanted to have a marriage.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.